You're Never Too Small for HR

Establishing an HR department is like taking out an insurance policy. With government fines and employee lawsuits, small employers can't afford not to have it.

Legal Compliance

An employer with as few as one employee has as many as 18 employment laws with which to comply. As the employer grows in employees, so do their employment law requirements. Many small employers make the mistake of waiting to establish these human resource functions until pressing employee issues come up.

First Step: Manual Updates

Ensuring basic legal compliance is the first step in establishing the essential functions of human resources. To become legally compliant, the small employer must review and audit all current HR practices for unlawful intentional and unintentional actions and inactions.

Based on the evaluation, customized company policies and procedures can then be created and feed into to the Employee Manual, which gets put into the hands of every new employee.

If you don't stick to your new established policies, it creates a liability for your company. It's vital to tie newly created policies and procedures as closely as possible to current lawful company practices.

Creating Company Policies and Procedures

When properly written and implemented, company policies can help defend the company in employment litigation.

Policies and procedures establish:

Clear relationships

Clear responsibilities

Clear consequences

Why Is This Important?

It shows that the employee had prior knowledge of a responsibility or consequence. However, simply having something in writing is not enough.